I shall have the heliotrope, she decided. When I look in the mirror and see my grey hair I know I can carry the heliotrope.
She went down to the bazaar towards evening which was the time she liked best, especially in November when it was quite cold and there were braziers and early lanterns and the small of charcoal and incense. She stood at the entrance to the durzi’s shop. A chokra beckoned her in, dusted a chair and invited her to sit and then went through the curtain which presently parted again to admit the old man and the chokra who was carrying the bolt of purple cloth.
‘Ah, so you know what I’ve come for,’ she said. He unravelled three or four yards and held it up. She gazed at it, testing for the edge of an old uncertainty and found it gone. ‘The name heliotrope,’ she said, ‘comes from the Greek words helios, meaning sun, and trepo meaning turn. Helio-tropion. A plant that turns its flowers to the sun.’
‘Memsahib has decided?’
‘Yes. And you have my measurements. The usual style, the skirt straight, box pleat at the back, the coat with pockets on my hips, deep enough and roomy enough for me to stick my hands in. As in the last suit, the grey one. I leave the choice of lining to you, it is always perfectly matched. When shall I come for the fitting?’
The fitting was a formality. Year by year his scissors and needle were wielded with precision, year by year she gained, lost, nothing in weight nor changed shape in any way. He had only to refer to his figures that were filed away either in a drawer or in his mind under the name Bachlev, Baba; the holy woman from the missions. The fitting was arranged for one week from that evening and the finished garment promised for delivery the morning of the day before the party. He gave her a snipping of the cloth. She put it in her handbag. It would be useful if she wanted to match up shoes, gloves and handbag, or to consider the tones of the blouse to go with it or of one of her sprays of velvet flowers for the lapel.
*
‘How nice you look, Barbie,’ Mabel had said. ‘What a happy colour,’ and had seemed almost eager to be off; but half-way down Club road she had suddenly turned as if she had changed her mind and would tell the tonga-wallah to take them back. In the lapel of the Bond Street costume a small diamond brooch glittered, a miniature of the Pankot Rifles badge. She wore no other jewellery. The brooch had been a gift from her first husband, who died on the Khyber. Her face was shaded by a grey felt hat with a wide brim. In place of a ribbon a fawn chiffon scarf was tied round the base of the crown. The free ends hung behind to shade her neck. Her legs, too often hidden by shabby gardening trousers, were still slim and well-shaped. Seated, the shortened skirt revealed them to the knee; to just below it when she stood. Fawn gloves covered the work-roughened hands.
We could go to Ranpur, Barbie had said the night before. To do some Christmas shopping. ‘Oh, I shall never go to Ranpur again,’ Mabel replied, ‘at least not until I’m buried,’ which had seemed to Barbie an odd sort of thing to say until she remembered that her friend’s second husband was buried there, in the churchyard of St Luke’s; and the way she now twisted round as if to tell the tonga-wallah to go back seemed like a momentary confusion, as if what was uppermost in her mind was the idea of going to Ranpur for that macabre purpose and the understanding that the time hadn’t yet come and that the journey downhill must be cancelled, or anyway postponed. And then her eye had been reattracted by Barbie’s heliotrope costume and the real object of the journey had again become clear. So that she resumed her position and watched the road unravel beneath her feet, and said nothing, but listened, or did not listen, while Barbie talked –
– or talked and was silent. God, she felt, had waited a long time for her to see that she could ignore the burden of her words which mounted one upon the other until they toppled, only to be set up again, and again, weighting her shoulders; a long time for her consciously to enter the private realm of inner silence and begin to learn how to inhabit it even while her body went its customary bustling way and her tongue clacked endlessly on: as at present, keeping time with the clack of the horse’s hooves as the equipage, avoiding the bazaar, dropped down through Cantonment Approach road, making for the military lines.
‘We’re late,’ she heard herself exclaim. In the world where she talked, where everybody talked, time was of peculiar importance. In Rifle Range road there were no other vehicles. They passed the end of grace and favour lane and in a moment or two turned left into Mess road. The geometrically laid out huts showed black against the green and the green itself was sparse, trodden. Distantly, in groups, sepoys drilled. A board painted in Pankot Rifles colours and with a huge gilt and coloured replica of the badge marked their destination. They turned at right-angles, crossing a culvert into a compound, approached the long square-pillared portico, and drove into it. When the tonga stopped Barbie could hear the uneven drone of voices inside. Servants stood at the entrance, dressed in white tunics and floppy white trousers. The ribbons in their pugrees, and their broad cummerbunds, were woven in horizontal stripes of the regimental colours. One of the servants, tall and thickly built, elderly, moved forward and saluted and stood offering his arm to Mabel.
‘Memsahib!’ he said.
Mabel had automatically put her hand on his wrist but the note of urgency in his voice arrested her. Her body seemed to stiffen with uncertainty or alarm. The servant spoke again and Barbie listened carefully so that she could tell Mabel louder and in English what he was saying.
‘He says he wonders if you remember him now that he’s old and has a beard.’
‘What?’
Barbie repeated it but was not sure Mabel understood. She was looking down at the man, her hand still gripping his wrist.
‘Is it Ghulam?’ she asked at last. ‘Ghulam Mohammed?’
The old man nodded and for a while they stared at each other. Then he turned his wrist over so that his palm touched hers.
‘You are well, Ghulam Mohammed?’ she asked in Urdu.
‘I am well. Is it so with you?’
‘It is so.’
‘God is good.’
‘Praise God. Ghulam, this is my friend, Miss Batchelor.’
‘Memsahib.’
‘Now we must go in,’ Mabel said in English. He made his arm into a crook and helped them down, and then up a shallow flight of steps into the dark interior.
‘Thank you,’ Mabel said, and added – as if to impress the name on a memory she could not trust – ‘Ghulam Mohammed.’
The hall was pillared. The voices came from a room on the left whose double doors were open. Barbie could see Mildred in a flowery hat, Colonel and Mrs Trehearne, and Susan looking younger than twenty-one talking to Kevin Coley, the depot adjutant who had lost his wife in the Quetta earthquake, was now the oldest captain in the regiment and said to be content to remain so. Barbie always thought he had a face like a medieval martyr; one of the unimportant ones who went to the stake in job lots.
And then, as they approached the doors, there was a change of rhythm in the voices, a slowing down, and a quietening; what Barbie recalled ever afterwards as a hush which spread back through the room and brought people’s heads round to watch Mabel’s arrival, her return after a long inexplicable absence to the place she had first entered longer ago than anyone else present, which meant that her presence now had a mystical significance. In her there surely reposed the original spirit of the hard condition, the spirit that belonged to the days of certainty, self-assurance, total conviction?
With several paces yet to go Mabel hesitated as if she would draw back and suddenly Barbie wished that they both could. But – ‘It is very crowded,’ Mabel said and then moved forward indomitably as Mildred came out to receive her. The brims of their hats forced distance on their embrace, but Mildred looked genuinely pleased and even grateful to Barbie whose trembling hand was taken in a gesture that implied there was greater affection than the social circumstances allowed Mildred to show. ‘You both made it,’ she said. ‘How nice. Mabel, there are some young boys who are dying to meet you but scared stiff so go easy on them for God’s sake. There’s one called Dicky Beauvais whose uncle was a subaltern under Bob Buckland. I know he’s particularly hoping for a word.’
‘Hello, Aunty.’ Susan said. ‘It’s so nice of you to come and thank you for the marvellous present.’ She kissed her aunt and then surprisingly kissed Barbie too and said, ‘What a nice colour,’ and led them into the still hushed assembly where the distance between Barbie and Mabel began subtly to lengthen because the Trehearnes interposed themselves and guided Mabel gradually towards the Rankins while the Peplows claimed Barbie as their own. Mabel looked over her shoulder, bewildered, but the already tenuous link was snapped by Mildred’s obtrusive hat and Kevin Coley’s crucified shoulder and Barbie felt herself forced away from the centre to the periphery. I never understood, Mrs Stewart was saying, your sudden interest in Emerson. I do not wish to talk about Emerson or indeed about anything, Barbie said, but only from inside that area of privacy and silence. Her voice was saying something quite different. Is Sarah here? she was asking Clarissa. She wasn’t at the door unless I missed her, how awful if I did. No I have not met Mrs Jason, how do you do?
There were glimpses to be had of the felt hat and the chiffon scarf. They formed a point of reference. Her eye continually sought it. The room, dark-panelled and Persian carpeted, was uncomfortably warm and close. Half-lowered tattis on the porticoed verandah kept out the glare. A bearer offered a tray and she took a glass of sherry to occupy her hands. She had not reckoned with this separation and it occurred to her that it had been engineered, arranged beforehand by Mildred with the innocent connivance of Clarissa Peplow who seemed to have assumed the duty of making sure that Barbie was kept entertained, refreshed, introduced and out of certain people’s way. She began to be afraid that when the time came for her to help Mabel slip away she would be unable to find her, which was ridiculous since there was only this one room in use and the verandah on the other side of the long buffet table, where the windows were open, letting in some fresh air. She looked for but could not see the display of wedding presents. Neither, now, could she see the hat with the chiffon scarf. The room frightened her.
‘What a nice suit, Barbie.’
It was Sarah. Barbie clasped her hand. ‘Is she all right do you think, in this crowd? I feel I ought to be with her but there are so many claims on her attention.’
‘They’ve got her a chair,’ Sarah said. ‘Over in the corner there. You can’t see her from here but she’s all right.’
‘We’re slipping away, you know, before the buffet.’
‘Yes, I know. Barbie, you know Tony Bishop, don’t you? He’s been posted to Bombay. Isn’t he lucky?’
‘We met once at Rose Cottage but you may not remember me from among all those young people.’ She offered her hand to the ill-looking man who had been Teddie Bingham’s friend. ‘Are you quite recovered from the jaundice?’
‘Thank you, yes.’
‘It is so debilitating, well so I gather, never having had it, only heard. I’ve always enjoyed excessive good health which I suppose is rather indecent, a sign of diminished sensibility perhaps, a certain coarseness of constitution no doubt inherited from my father whose life was terminated by the wheels of a hansom cab or bus on the Embankment I forget which in fact I was never quite sure but everyone expected him to go from cirrhosis of the liver which given the same intake any ordinary man would have contracted. Did you change your mind, Sarah, I mean about the presents? Susan told me they’d be on display but perhaps it proved too difficult, I mean they’d need guarding wouldn’t they?’
*
But the presents were on display on the verandah, guarded by a naik and two sepoys who stood stiffly in the at ease position not catching the eye of any guest because it was not the guests of whom they had to entertain suspicion but intruders or contractors’ servants coming too near the sparkling array of cutlery, glass, tea and coffee sets, trays, table-lamps, vases and carved boxes. A kind of queue had formed, as for the rite of passing by a bier Barbie thought when fifteen minutes later she accompanied the Peplows and Mrs Stewart to inspect the remains of the wedding. The verandah was crowded too.
Trees partially screened the view across to the grace and favour bungalow which Barbie had never been inside because she had always declined Sarah’s invitation to go in when – as they sometimes did – they shared a tonga from the bazaar and Barbie went out of her way to bring Sarah home. She thought she could hear Panther barking. There were cries from the parade ground. But the verandah of the mess seemed to lack conditions in which an echo could exist. Voices, sounds, had a brazen hollow quality. ‘Wavell’s the first Viceroy we’ve had who knows anything about the country and then of course he’s a soldier,’ someone told her but when she glanced round the speaker’s face was not turned to her but to another man and she did not know either of them. When they reached the loaded table she could not see the spoons.
‘Absolutely splendid, I agree,’ she said, taking Clarissa up, ‘a splendid display.’
After a while she abandoned her feverish attempts to find the spoons and carefully, slowly, quartered the table from edge to edge and from front to back. She longed but did not dare to ask Clarissa, ‘Do you see my little Apostle spoons anywhere?’ She wondered if she had a wrong impression of what they looked like in their box and looked twice at pastry forks and for any box whose lid was not open; stooped to see whether they were placed where the eye could not fall on them easily from a standing position. ‘Excuse me,’ someone said, and straightening quickly to let a woman pass behind her had to steady herself with a hand placed too quickly and heavily on the table so that for an instant she feared being the cause of a shameful and unforgivable incident. ‘Oh, Barbie, be careful,’ Clarissa said. ‘I think we’d better stand back.’ ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said and then came away to be out of danger and free of the risk of other people’s anger.